Oscar has experience with strike-related uncertainty

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - It's not quite deja vu
all over again. But as the planning proceeds for the Academy
Awards on February 24, it's worth flashing back 20 years to the
last time Oscar had to deal with a writers strike.

The two situations aren't completely analogous: With a
possible resolution to the three-month strike pending, the
Academy hopes that writers, and the actors who support them,
will all show up at the Kodak Theatre.

In 1988, the situation was reversed. That year, the Oscars
were scheduled for April 11. The Writers Guild of America went
out on strike March 7. The Academy's request to use union
writers was denied.

But when the strike was called, the three writers mapping
out the show -- Ernest Lehman, Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose
-- already had been hard at work plotting out the evening with
the help of index cards spread across Lehman's pool table. By
the time the three were forced to put down their pencils, they
estimated they had already completed 80%-90% of the show's
"book."

Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who produced that year's show, recalls
that the writers already had done a lot of work to streamline
the presenters' introductions, eliminating much of the comic
banter that often had fallen flat in previous years. "The first
thing we did," he says of the prestrike planning, "was cut that
out of the show."

Once the strike forced the writers' departure, of course,
the opportunity for last-minute rewrites was lost. But Goldwyn
already had enlisted Chevy Chase as host, along with a lineup
of presenters heavy on comic talent such as Robin Williams and
Billy Crystal.

While the press at the time assumed that the comics were
chosen for their ability to ad-lib off-script, Goldwyn says:
"It wasn't a writing issue. We just wanted people who were
instinctively funny."

As Crystal explained backstage after his appearance: "Those
of us who write our own stuff were not allowed to use new
material, only jokes that were written before the strike.
That's why there was no topical stuff. It's crazy: I'm striking
myself and picketing my own house."
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